Source # 1 - Interactive Diagram of a World War One Trench - click here
Biography - Eric Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque was born in Germany in 1898 to a working class family. His father worked as an independent printer and bookbinder. Remarque was studying to be a teacher when he was drafted into the German Army in 1916. Remarque served in a military engineering unit building and repairing fortification on the frontline. He was wounded in an artillery attack in July 1917 and spent most of the rest of the war in a military hospital recovering from his wounds. The war ended a few days before Remarque returned to active service in 1918.
Following the war, like many soldiers, Remarque tried to return to society and build a life for himself. And like many former soldiers, Remarque had difficulty with this readjustment. During this time, he worked as a teacher, accountant, and even a tombstone salesman, before he settled on being a writer. His personal life was also chaotic with his first marriage ending in divorce.
In 1928, Remarque wrote All Quiet on the Western Front based on his own wartime experiences. The simple and blunt language underlined the horrific reality of war described in the book. In the introduction to the book, Remarque wrote, “I will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have survived shells, were destroyed by the war.” The describes a group of school friends who all enlist in the army at the start of the war and how over the course of the war they are all either killed or wounded in the fighting. All Quiet was first published in 1929 and became an instant best-seller, selling more than 1 million copies in Germany alone and being translated into 23 languages. The next year, Hollywood produced a film version of the novel that was released to an international audience.
The success of All Quiet made Remarque an international figure and a wealthy man. The book also brought Remarque into conflict with the emerging Nazi Party. The anti-war theme of novel went against the Nazis attempts to rewrite and glorify the history of the German army in First World War. Nazis invented a story that Remarque was a Jew, interrupted the screening of the film in Berlin and publicly burned Remarque’s books because, in the eyes of the Nazis, the books “betrayed the soldiers of World War One”. When Hitler took over Germany, the Nazis attempted to have Remarque arrested. Remarque fled to Switzerland and eventually to the United States – where he became a citizen in 1947. Over the course of the rest of his life, he only returned to Germany for short visits. He died in Switzerland in 1970.
Source # 2 - Video Clip of the opening scene to the movie All Quiet On the Western Front that shows German and French soldiers fighting in the trenches - click here
Note - You need to be logged into you Bedford Google Account to watch the video
Biography - Otto Dix
Otto Dix was born in Germany in 1891 to a working class family. His father was an iron worker and his mother was a seamstress. As a child he was introduced to art by his cousin who was a painter, who helped him get an apprenticeship to be a painter. In 1910, Dix went to the city of Dresden to attend art school.
When the war began in 1914, Dix was caught up in the excitement of the war and volunteered to serve in the German army. Dix commanded a machine gun unit on the Western Front and fought against the British in the Battle of the Somme. Dix was wounded several times in the war; the last time was in August 1918 when he was nearly killed from being shot in the neck. A medic was able to stop the bleeding and saved his life. The war ended while Dix was recovering in the hospital.
During the war, Dix kept a diary and a sketchbook with which he chronicled his experience. They would provide material for a major work of fifty prints called simply, The War. Dix was profoundly affected by the war. He described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through bombed out houses. His experience with war and its aftermath became a dominant theme in the art he produced after 1914.
Dix returned to Dresden after the war and tried to go back to studying art, the memories of the war soon crept into his work. Dix was haunted by the brutality of war and he tried to capture this in his painting. He painted desolate battle fields that were carved with military trenches and strewn with bodies. Dix’s painting showed soldiers as mutilated, wounded, suffering or mad. In 1924, Dix published fifty of his pictures in a book called simply “The War”. Two years later, in 1926, he became a professor of art in Dresden.
When Adolf Hitler and the Nazis hated Dix’s art which they considered “Degenerate” and because it did not glorify German soldiers. When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Dix lost his job as a professor and many of his painting were destroyed. However, at the end of World War Two, Dix was forced to join the Nazi army. He was captured by the French and spent the end of the war as a prisoner. After the war, he returned to Germany and worked as painter until he died in 1969.
Source # 3 - Drawing by Otto Dix
Drawing of Battlefield
Drawing of Machine Gun Team Advancing
Drawing of Soldiers During an Attack
Drawing of Soldiers In a Trench
Drawing of Soldiers Carrying a Wounded Soldier
Drawing of Soldiers During Role Call After a Battle
Source # 4 - Excerpt from the graphic novel It was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi - click here
Note - You need to be logged into you Bedford Google Account to access the excerpt
Biography - Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 in England to a working class family. His father was a railroad station master. Owen became interested in poetry as a child and passed the exams to attend university. However, he was unable to get a scholarship and his family was too poor to pay for his studies. Instead, Owen worked as a teacher in both England and France before the war. It was during this time that he worked on developing his poetry.
In 1915, Owen enlisted in the British Army. After military training, he was sent to fight on the Western Front as an officer. In the fighting, Owen suffered several traumatic brain injuries from falling into a shell hole and by being blown high in the air by an explosion. He was diagnosed with “shell-shock” (the term used at the time for post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD) and was sent back to Britain to recover at the Craiglockhart War Hospital. It was here that met Siegfried Sassoon, another British soldier who was a well-known poet. During their treatment, Sassoon gave Owen guidance and encouragement to bring his war experiences into his poetry. It was during this time that Owen found his true poetic voice. Most the poems for which he is now remembered were written during this time period. The poem, Dulce et Decorum est is one of Owen’s most famous poems. The title is in Latin and means, “It is sweet and honorable” and it refers to a poem by famous Roman poet Horace, who said it was “to die for one’s country”. Many people in England who supported the war used this saying to describe the young men killed in the war. Owen said that this view of the war was a lie. In the poem he described how dying in war was horrific and meaningless.
In October 1918, Owen returned to military service on the Western Front to be part of the British attack to break the final German defenses, called the Hindenburg Line. He bravely led his soldiers in the attacks and was awarded the Military Cross. He was killed in battle on November 4, 1918 –exactly one week before the Armistice ended the fighting.
Source # 5 - Video about the use of poison gas and Wilfred Owen's Poem Dulce et Decorum Est - click here
Source # 6 - Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen - the name of the poem translates as "It is sweet and honorable" which is use in the phase at the end of the poem and concludes with the Latin for "to die for one’s country”
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares (2) we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots (4)
Of tired, outstripped (5) Five-Nines (6) that dropped behind.
Gas! (7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets (8) just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime (9) . . .
Dim, through the misty panes (10) and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, (11) choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud (12)
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest (13)
To children ardent (14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
2. Flares - rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in the area between the front lines
3. Distant rest - a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days, or longer
4. Hoots - the noise made by the shells rushing through the air
5. Outstripped - outpaced, the soldiers have struggled beyond the reach of these shells which are now falling behind them as they struggle away from the scene of battle
6. Five-Nines - 5.9 caliber explosive shells
7. Gas! - poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the lungs with fluid had the same effects as when a person drowned
8. Helmets - the early name for gas masks
9. Lime - a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue
10. Panes - the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks
11. Guttering - Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining down a gutter, referring to the sounds in the throat of the choking man
12. Cud - normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew usually green and bubbling. Here a similar looking material was coming from the soldier's mouth
13. High zest - enthusiasm, eagerness
14. ardent – desiring
